Estimating Heritability and BLUPs for Traits Using Tomato Phenotypic Data

During this webinar, delivered live at the 2011 Tomato Disease Workshop in Ithaca, NY, Dr. Heather Merk from the Ohio State University describes how to obtain the SolCAP tomato phenotypic data, how to estimate heritability on a line mean basis, and how to estimate BLUPs for traits.

This workshop/webinar module focuses on estimating trait heritability on a line mean basis and estimating best linear unbiased predictors (BLUPs) for traits using the tomato fruit shape, size, color, and quality data collected for SolCAP as an example.

Part 2

Importing and checking the data, visualizing the data, setting the model with nesting and interactions, treating main effects as fixed or random, installing and loading the lme4 package in R, calculating the variance components, estimating heritability.

Additional Resources

Update to LME4

There have been several “Major User” changes to lme4 since this webinar was presented. Some of these changes affect the script provided with the webinar (below), and result in an error being generated. The supplemental file "CHANGES_to_lme4_V2.0.pdf" provided under attachments describes some of these changes and additional R code that will be needed to analyze the data provided.

Funding Statement

Development of this page was supported in part by the National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) Solanaceae Coordinated Agricultural Project, agreement 2009-85606-05673, administered by Michigan State University. Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this publication are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the view of the United States Department of Agriculture.